Deanna Zantingh

University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto

"Reconciliation is a Radical Ecological Vision of Care: Treaty As Deep Roots for a (Re)new(ed) Social Contract"



Biography

Deanna Zantingh is a PhD student at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. She holds a prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Alongside a decade of experience in community-based partnerships with Indigenous children and youth, she has also worked with Indigenous elders and clergy at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre, where she currently sits as a Keeper of the Vision. She lives in Toronto — lands governed by the Dish With One Spoon Treaty — and works with a creative interdisciplinary research team at the Critical Health & Social Action Research Lab. Her work explores connections between spirituality, eco-theology, and suicide prevention.

Paper Abstract

At a Traditional Knowledge Keepers Forum held by the Canadian Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Mi'kmaq Elder Stephen Augustine suggested that humanity's relationships with the earth and all living beings are relevant in working towards reconciliation. Similarly, Blackfoot Elder Reg Crowshoe explained reconciliation must be broader than Canada's approach because "Reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal perspective, also requires reconciliation with the natural world. If human beings resolve problems between themselves but continue to destroy the natural world, then reconciliation remains incomplete." A careful reading of TRC documents compounds the reasons for exploring its ecological vision. Beyond its strong emphasis on the role of Indigenous understandings of treaty in reconciliation, its call to centre Indigenous understandings of justice and healing, and its assertion of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People as the framework for reconciliation, a still further and more basic truth remains: the Residential School System was not about education, it was always one of many settler colonial constructs to gain control over the land. Apologies for this larger system can only find true expression in living out a different ecological vision that reframes the ethics and distorted relationality undergirding cultural genocide and ecocide. This paper examines the radical ecological vision of care at the heart of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It conceptualizes treaty through the lens of feminist and Indigenous care ethics as a deeply rooted responsibility held by all beings; a shared human responsibility still capable of growing a different social contract in our every day living. Amidst the challenges of neoliberal systems in the anthropocene, it shows that renewed Indigenous understanding of treaties invite a more inclusive social contract and reframe ecological ethics in pursuit of reconciliation toward respect, healing, and care between all beings.